Italo Balbo

Italo Balbo (6 June 1896-28 June 1940) was the Governor-General of Italian Libya from 1 January 1934 to 28 June 1940, succeeding Pietro Badoglio and preceding Rodolfo Graziani.

Biography
Italo Balbo was born on 6 June 1896 in Quartesana, Ferrara, Italy, and in 1910 he attempted to join a rebellion in Albania led by Giuseppe Garibaldi's son Ricciotti Garibaldi. He supported Italy's joining World War I as a part of the Entente Powers, and in 1915 he joined the Royal Italian Army, fighting with bravery at the Battle of Caporetto and being promoted to Captain for his honorable service. After the war, he gained a law degree, and in 1921 he joined the National Fascist Party; his own gang of blackshirts assisted landowners in putting down strikes and attacked people who liked communism or socialism. Along with Michele Bianchi, Cesare Maria de Vecchi, and Emilio De Bono, Balbo was one of the "quadrumvirs" that planned the 1922 March on Rome, and in 1923 he was responsible for killing the anti-fascist priest Giovanni Minzoni.

On 12 September 1929 Balbo was appointed Minister of the Air Force, and he was a known aviator. President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States invited him to lunch and gave him a medal for his aviation services, and Italian-American crowds in New York City and Chicago cheered him on; he told them to be proud that they were Italians, as Mussolini had ended the "era of humiliations". In 1934, he was appointed Governor-General of Italian Libya after Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan were merged into a singular province of Libya, and his moving there was probably due to his anti-centralization stance on government and the threat he posed to fascist leader Benito Mussolini. He sought to attract Italian immigrants to Libya, and he wanted to draw Muslims to the fascist cause, and in 1938 he was the only member of the fascist regime to oppose the laws passed against the Jews.

In 1939, at the start of World War II, Balbo opposed Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland and Mussolini's friendship with Adolf Hitler, saying that Italians would shine the shoes of Germany if they did not side with the United Kingdom instead. On 10 June 1940, when Italy declared war on the Allied Powers, Balbo planned an invasion of Egypt, but the Italian 10th Army suffered reverses against the British Army. On 28 June, matters became worse when the Royal Air Force launched an air attack on the Italian airfield at Tobruk. Balbo attempted to land at the airfield, but the Italians mistook his plane for a British one and shot it down, killing him. Rodolfo Graziani succeeded him as Governor-General of Libya.